ARTICLES ABOUT IGOR STRAVINSKY BY DATE - PAGE 3

The DuPage Symphony Orchestra will perform its first Discovery Concert at 4 p.m. Sunday at Pfeiffer Hall in Naperville. The performance, designed to educate and entertain, focuses on shorter musical pieces combined with commentary on style, techniques and composers. "Every year, the orchestra performs school day concerts in Elmhurst and our conductor, Barbara Schubert, tells the children about the music they're about to hear," said Jeff Mattson of Glen Ellyn, who heads the marketing committee for the orchestra.

Chicago audiences have known and appreciated Andrew Davis much longer as a symphonic conductor than an operatic maestro. All the same, it was good to find him leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at Symphony Center with as decisive a hand as he has brought to his first season as music director of Lyric Opera. Davis' imaginatively varied program suggested the broad range of his repertory interests. Anchoring the concert were two 20th Century masters who used similar technical and musical means to realize very different expressive ends.

As with the abundance of autumn, it's always elating when Pierre Boulez arrives at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and always dispiriting when he leaves. On Thursday night our principal guest conductor bid adieu to Symphony Center for another season with music by composers who, like Boulez with his own music, questioned tradition and reinvented the rules -- Claude Debussy, Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky. It was a marvelous program, a perfect balance of contrasting styles, the sort of program nobody conducts better than Boulez and no orchestra plays with such discipline and strength -- this after two already demanding Boulez weeks.

The city by the bay likes to think big and adventuresome, on occasion. Case in point: The city's premier musical organizations, the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony, have gone head to head this month, both mounting ambitious festivals built around the music of two of the great revolutionaries of their centuries, Richard Wagner and Igor Stravinsky. The Opera was first up with a revival of its celebrated 1985 production of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen." The first of four sold-out cycles opened June 9, and Valhalla will go up in flames a final time July 3 at the War Memorial Opera House.

The Chicago Chamber Musicians and Museum of Contemporary Art will kick off the second season of their ambitious, wide-ranging "Music at the Millennium" festival at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago Ave. The opening concert, "Folk Music and Native Ritual," will be preceded by a conversation with composer Richard Mills, whose "Requiem Diptych" will be performed on the same program as chamber works by modernist giants Igor Stravinsky, Charles...

CAUCASIA By Danzy Senna (Riverhead $12.95) A first novel about a biracial girl who comes of age in the early '70s as she watches black-power politics divide her parents. IGOR STRAVINSKY: An Autobiography By Igor Stravinsky (Penguin $13) The composer of "The Firebird" and "The Rite of Spring" chronicles the first half-century of his life. THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN By Jacqueline Mitchard (Signet $7.99) The story of a family's emotional fallout after a 3-year-old is kidnapped.

"Rock 'n' roll is the hamburger that ate the world." --Peter York "Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." --Igor Stravinsky "Opera in English is just about as sensible as baseball in Italian." --H.L. Mencken "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." --Voltaire "I don't know anything about music. In my line, you don't have to." --Elvis Presley

Normally, he's a man not content to confine himself to the strictures of The Dance. After all, this is a choreographer known for giving non-dancers the stage: Terminally ill patients speak of their joy and their pain. Just plain folks strip butt-naked. A preacher tells it like it is. Indeed, whether or not you like his work, from the raging "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin" to the poetic "Still Here," MacArthur Fellow Bill T. Jones always has something to say--even if, as his critics charge, that means beating the audience over the head a bit to drive the point home.

By No one fled until the last note faded as smoke filled the opera, Tribune special correspondent Elizabeth Williamson reports. Elizabeth Williamson is a free-lance journalist who contributes to the Tribune from St. Petersburg, Russia | March 20, 1998

Russia--Never yell "fire" in a crowded theater. That was one of my first thoughts when smoke began to fill the stage of the Mussorgsky Theater of Opera and Ballet here one night recently. My spouse and I had come to the 19th Century theater in downtown St. Petersburg to see "Eugene Onegin," Peter Tchaikovsky's opera based on the Alexander Pushkin poem about a perennially bored young rake, Eugene, who shuns the shy but deep-feeling Tatiana, only to realize after her marriage to another that she is the woman of his dreams.

Stravinsky in America. Agon, Ode, Scenes de Ballet, Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam, Circus Polka, Scherzo a la Russe, Concertino for 12 Instruments, Greeting Prelude, Canon, Star-Spangled Banner (harmonized Stravinsky) London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor (RCA Victor) If there were a Grammy Award for funniest cover art, this would sweep the boards. Thomas' generous and enjoyable anthology of scores produced during Igor Stravinsky's more than three decades in the U.S. comes adorned with an illustration of the young conductor chauffeuring a starry-eyed Stravinsky around Beverly Hills in what looks like an old Mercury Comet.